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Less than a week

In a previous entry I talked about my fear of being marginalized in Finland, of not finding my place. Well, we have had a pretty interesting conversation about a book written by a woman who was living in Finland for many years but is originally Palestinian (I am sorry, I forgot her name).

Among the things she mentions there and what we have been talking, two caught my attention in a special way:

One was the idea that Finnish people should take into account that when they firstly arrived to Finland there were other people living there too, the Saami people. Due to my personal interest on the topic I am very concious of Saami people existence and problems, but it was therefore shocking to realise that it might be possible that Finnish kids don’t learn in school who are the Saami. There should be some seminar or lesson about this in which they kids could get familiar with this topic from an objective perspective.

The second thing was that you should respect everybody’s traditions and avoid judging and having prejudices on someone because of their background or nationality. This wasn’t new to me, but has made me get a bit scared on how am I going to be seen by others. Could people pre-judge me as a Spanish? Am I going to be considered as a less valid professional because of my passport?

In my previous Finnish experience and my working time in Helsinki, I didn’t feel I was less valuable or a “second class” person, but it’s going to be interesting to see what is going to happen now. I am sure it’s going to be as fine as on the first time, but I will let you know in case something happens.